Congratulations to John "JT" Mendoza, one of our 2019 Most Influential People in Security awardees, who is retiring from federal government service after 22 years. He will be joining CGI as Director of Global Security, primarily responsible for establishing a global insider risk management program.
After 14 years of finding last-minute goalies, securing locker room doors, and trying to parcel out equal ice time to the skaters, I recently shed the captain’s “C” from the jersey of my recreational hockey team
In recent years, Enterprise Risk Management has become increasingly focused on cybersecurity risks. While this focus on cyber is understandable, the current COVID crisis has demonstrated that the unpredictable nature of cascading risks requires viewing risk through a much wider risk aperture. One way forward to successfully navigate this new risk frontier is the establishment of a Risk Operations Center (ROC). The ROC enables enterprise and technology leaders to have the continuous monitoring they require to proactively mitigate all cyber issues. Additionally, it fully supports the CISO/cybersecurity leader's principal responsibilities identified by the HBR survey.
COVID-19 has completely changed our world from six months ago, as we continue to battle the grave health implications, face extended stay at home orders, and grapple with the insurmountable ramifications on our economy. The pandemic has also forever changed the cyber threat landscape, with our workforce becoming more dispersed, and potentially more vulnerable, than ever as organizations switch out of the confines of their offices and move entire data streams to their laptops and home offices. On top of this, Salesforce has announced it is ending its Data Recovery service on July 31st, which is putting all of the data protection responsibilities, and the dire consequences that comes along with it, on the backs of the customer.
To address this current losing war with cyberattackers, the future of cybersecurity requires augmenting the current focus of “indicators of compromise” with “indicators of exposure & warning” in real-time. Where the measure would be to gauge the shift of incident management that would tilt on managing more incidents at warning stages than on compromise stages. It is imperative to build an AI engine to perform this very task as that would be the only way to perform in real-time, scale with the growing nature of cloud as well as to cover the evolving nature to attack scenarios.
As the head of information security for a technology company with more than a thousand (now mostly-remote) employees, the COVID-19 pandemic has been — among other adjectives — an educational experience. And while it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, I believe one of the reasons we were able to transition so quickly to remote work with relatively few hiccups is that we established practices to withstand precisely this type of scenario long before the virus swept through our community.
U.S. Rep. John Katko introduced legislation to require the federal government to report to Congress on their preparation planning to address the effects of a potential COVID-19 resurgence.